Tag: moon village

STRASBOURG, France (ISU PR) — This week, more than 150 experts, engineers, educators and students from around the world gathered in Strasbourg, France to participate in the first International Moon Village Workshop. The Workshop was jointly organized by the recently-formed Moon Village Association (MVA) and the International Space University (ISU), and was held at the permanent campus of the ISU.

There’s been a lot of speculation since the election on what president-elect Donald Trump will do with the nation’s civilian and military space programs.

Two Trump advisors laid out some goals before the election: more commercial partnerships, boosting defense spending, increasing hypersonics and slashing NASA Earth science. However, most details remain unclear.

A key question is whether Trump really cares about space all that much. That’s a little hard to discern given his comments during the campaign.

When first questioned on the subject, he expressed a preference for fixing potholes in America’s crumbling streets over sending people to Mars. Trump has promised a large infrastructure repair program.

During a visit to Florida, he attacked the Obama Administration for allegedly wrecking NASA and the space program. During another appearance in the Sunshine State about a week later, Trump praised the space agency for how well it was performing.

So, NASA is either doing great, a disaster that needs to be made great again, or an obstacle to pothole repair. Assuming Trump actually cares, and he’s willing to spend some money on making NASA great again, what might he do? What major decisions does he face?(more…)

Video Caption: Jan Woerner, Director General of the European Space Agency, has a bold new vision for space exploration. “My intention is to build up a permanent base station on the Moon,” he tells Euronews from the agency’s main control room in Darmstadt. “Meaning that it’s an open station, for different member states, for different states around the globe.”

Mankind has never had a permanent lunar presence, and so this new vision, that Woerner likes to call the ‘Moon village’, would represent a giant leap in space exploration.